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Flower power:
The end of Gazaʼs most
How plants beautiful neighbourhood

bounce back aer

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 GETTY IMAGES

A busy lizzie, an example of a flower able to recover

quickly from being trampled on

By Matt McGrath The end of Gazaʼs most

Environment correspondent
beautiful neighbourhood

Some flowers can recover with remarkable speed

aer a major accident, such as being walked upon
by humans.

Scientists found that species including orchid and

sweet pea could re-orient themselves in 10-48
hours aer an injury

These plants are able to bend, twist and reposition

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their stems to ensure that they reproduce.
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But others such as buttercups fail to bounce back
aer damage.

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The remarkable abilities of some flowers to recover
West Bank
quickly from serious injury, have been previously
overlooked by science, say the authors of this new
work.

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GETTY IMAGES

A clematis flower, which doesn't recover quickly from

:
 injury

Researchers looked at 23 native and cultivated

flower species in the UK, Europe, Australia and
North and South America.

They examined species which had suffered

Which films and TV series will
accidents and they also carried out experiments
resume production as actors'
where the flowers were tethered at either 45 or 90
strike ends?
degrees off their normal orientation.

For many flowers, their ability to reproduce

depends on the careful alignment of their sexual
organs or stigma and their nectar tubes in order for
a visiting pollinator to help them make seeds.

The scientists found that when these species were

damaged, they could accurately reposition their
sexual organs.

"The common spotted orchid does it largely by just Whatever happened to NFTs?
bending the main stem," said Prof Scott Armbruster
from the University of Portsmouth who led the
research.

"It's pretty quick, within a day or two, it's reoriented

its main stem so that now all the flowers are in the
right position," he told BBC News.

"The slightly more interesting ones were where

each individual flower re-orients on its own, by the
sub stem, that's what's called the pedicel Weekly quiz: Who shone at the
connecting the flower to the main stem, and that is Women of the Year awards?
bending or twisting. And that's what you see with
aconitum."

These rapid recovering species were usually

bilaterally symmetrical flowers, which is where the
le and right hand sides mirror each other.
Examples of these types of flowers include
snapdragon, orchid and sweet pea.

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 ARMBRUSTER

A bilaterally symmetrical orchid, one of the flowers

capable of bouncing back quickly from an injury
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Other species, termed radially symmetrical, such as about the festival
sunflower, petunia, buttercup and wild rose have far
fewer abilities to bounce back. Even if they lose
their orientation, they are still capable of
reproducing. Elsewhere on the BBC
"The ones that do it are the ones where it matters.
And the ones that don't do it are the ones where it
doesn't really matter," said Prof Armbruster.

"The radially symmetrical flowers like clematis had

a nice radially symmetrical flower. And the same
with passion flower, and they don't bounce back.
We tether them and they just stay there or they
might change position but not in a way that
corrects their position." The employees secretly using
ChatGPT
The research has been published in the journal
New Phytologist.

Follow Matt on Twitter @mattmcgrathbbc.

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